No One's Home

by D. M. Pulley

  “It’s not your fault,” he whispered. “There’s nothing you could’ve done. They had police and courts and social workers, and it wouldn’t have worked. You were just a kid. It’s not your fault.”

  Eventually, he felt her stiffen and go quiet. She pulled away from his arms and wiped her face. It took several more minutes for him to build up the courage to finally ask, “Why are you still waiting for him?”

  “Because I am. I always am.” She squinted up at a nondescript shadow hovering in the attic window. If she tilted her head just right, it was the shape of a boy.

  Hunter followed her gaze but saw nothing.

  “This place. They built it from Shaker wood and stone. Did you know that?” she said. “They believed if you stood in the right spot, if you sang just the right song . . . you could talk to the dead.”

  “Do you talk to him?”

  She shook her head and let out an aching laugh. “I try. I really do . . . Sometimes I think I even see him. Sometimes I think I’m just seeing things because I want to.”

  “I know what you mean. I used to try to talk to Allison late at night. I used to imagine her lying next to me in bed, listening. But . . .” His heart broke for her. “Do you think Toby wants you to stay here like this?”

  “I don’t know. He hated to be alone, and I feel like I left him when he needed me most. It’s all my fault. If I had just let Papa . . .” She couldn’t finish the rest.

  “It’s not your fault, Ava. It’s not.” He searched the sky for what to say and what to do. “Do you have any other family?”

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah. Me neither.” The gunshots reverberated down his spine again, making him flinch. The terrible sequence of events replayed again in his mind. His head snapped to the side as though slapped. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. This is all my fault. It is.” She pushed herself away from him. “I should’ve left you and your parents alone. I just . . . I wanted to scare you. All of you. I wanted you all to go away and leave my house alone. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do, Ava?”

  More tears slid down her face as she confessed to him all the things she’d left out for Myron and Margot to find and all the ways she’d exposed their secrets and lies.

  “I just thought they would leave and go back to Boston. I thought Margot would get therapy or something. I wanted Myron to go to rehab before he hurt another patient. I shouldn’t have done it. I never thought it would end like this.”

  Hunter sat silent, digesting everything she’d said and done, unfelt emotions crashing against his numbed brain. She’d locked his mother in the attic. She’d stolen his mother’s nightgown. She’d left out the drugs for Margot to find. She’d led Myron to the naked videos. She’d been haunting the house ever since they bought it.

  After what felt like an hour of buzzing silence, he said more to himself than to her, “It’s not your fault. You didn’t make him a heroin addict. You weren’t in Boston when that girl died. You didn’t make my mom troll the internet for attention or validation or whatever the hell she was looking for. You didn’t hit me or fire the gun. You didn’t do any of those things, Ava. It’s not your fault. They’ve been fucked up for years.” He stared up at the three stars that managed to shine through the light pollution of the city. “You know, my mom tried to kill herself a few years ago. I’m not supposed to know about it, but she went away for a few weeks back when I was fifteen . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, Hunter. I didn’t know.”

  “I think they thought this house would make them normal again. Funny, huh?”

  “It’s not funny,” she said in a dull voice. “Maybe it would’ve worked if I’d left you all alone.”

  “No. There’s something wrong with this place. It’s ruined every family that ever lived here.” Hunter sat up a bit straighter. “Do you think that old fortune-teller, Madame Nala, was right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “About there being bodies buried here? About this place being haunted?” He’d begun to tremble as the aftershocks set in. His hand went to the welt on his face where Myron had hit him.

  She didn’t speak for a moment, and then she said, “What do you think they want?”

  “Who?”

  “The ghosts.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they want us to leave. Maybe they want us to die here too.” Hunter kept his eyes on the house and imagined all the past owners staring out through the windows, trapped inside. He could see his own face framed behind a pane of glass.

  What is going to happen to me? he wondered. Will I end up homeless or in foster care like Ava? His mind reeled with images of his mother in a jail cell and his father in a hospital bed and the sound of the gun firing again and again.

  “Fuck this,” he said and took off for the garage.

  “Where are you going?” Ava called after him, suddenly terrified of being left alone. “Hunter?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he typed in the code to the garage door and watched it roll open. Inside, he flipped on the overhead light and grabbed a spade. He marched back over to the spot where Ava stood. “Nala said bones were buried here, right? Under the stones. That means no proper burial, no proper resting place.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe Caleb was right. Maybe this is fucking Poltergeist, and these bones need to be found. Okay?”

  “That sounds kinda . . . crazy.” She cracked half a smile.

  “Yeah. Well. We could burn the house down instead.” Hunter drove the shovel into the ground. It felt good to tear into something. It felt good to make a hole. He knew he should be calling the police and finding out where they’d put his mother. He knew he should be going to the hospital to check on his dad. But that would make everything that had happened real.

  He threw a shovel full of dirt onto the grass and looked up at his only friend within five hundred miles. “Do you have a better idea?”

  58

  The Rawlings Family

  October 3, 1929

  The Believers wouldn’t recognize this valley, Ninny Boyd mused, counting her steps through the backyard of the enormous brick mansion. On the other side of it, Lee Road ran in the track of the old road that had once cut through the Center Family village. The home before her was big enough to house twenty of the lost children they’d once taken in as their own. It was an island unto itself, an isolated monument to individualism, capitalism, materialism, and modern American success. Mother Ann’s dream of a holy utopia had borne out something else entirely.

  Ninny walked much more slowly now. Huddled under a red woolen coat, she inched her way across the site of the old gathering house. Her thick body, hunched and limping slightly to the left, dwarfed the girl she’d once been. That girl still looked out through her blue eyes, but they were much darker now, with heavy lids, the skin creased by time and weather. It had been over seventy-five years. She’d outlived them all, but more importantly, she’d been right. The Elders hadn’t seen what she’d seen that night in the Grove. They hadn’t seen the ruin coming. They hadn’t seen this future without a trace of them left.

  Ninny stopped and looked back toward the three remaining trees of the Holy Grove for a bearing and then gazed down at her feet. They were still there. The four bodies, just bones now, lay there beneath the garden, watching the sky. The headstones she’d made for them were missing. An elaborate birdbath sat inches from them. A stone patio had been laid across the graves, and an iron lattice bench had been set above them to ponder the enormous house Walter Rawlings had built seven years earlier.

  Too old to kneel, she lowered her brittle frame onto the white iron bench, keeping her eyes on the ground. Tulips and daffodils would sprout in spring over their bodies. Ninny studied the dried flower stalks trapped in a nest of English ivy. The garden had been laid out in an attempt at an English style—flower beds lined with hedges, stone pathways, and
staged moments of country repose. Ninny studied the artifice, noting the lack of a vegetable garden, fruit tree, or berry patch, and shook her head. None of the plants were of any practical use. Scanning the backs of the houses lined up in a row made it clear that none of them made much use of the fertile ground so prized by the Believers. None of them would survive a day on their own.

  Settling her eyes back to the ground, she let out a long sigh and began, her voice as crinkled and worn as crepe paper. “I still don’t know your names. Isn’t that something? After all these years. I still don’t know.”

  Her eyes swam with tears penned in by drooping lids. “I suppose it’s too late now to do anything about that. It’s too late for a lot of things. For all I know, they moved you somewhere else when the builders came through.”

  She laughed then even though she didn’t find it funny. She clasped her hands in prayer, suspecting that the stones she’d laid over the graves had been moved by the Elders long ago. “No. You’re still here, aren’t you. They couldn’t face what they had done and failed to do. They left you here. Those builders didn’t dig deep so far from the house.”

  She gazed up at the undisturbed trees that dotted the back of the garden. They’d been saplings when she’d left. She closed her eyes and listened. Underneath the rumble of the streetcars and the singing birds, she strained to hear the faint squall of a baby crying. Ninny hummed the song she’d heard coming up from the root cellar those many years ago.

  When this world comes raining down

  I shall build a home beneath the ground.

  And when the storm breaks the sky

  I shall shelter you where I die.

  The song broke her heart all over again. Ninny went quiet a moment and then whispered to the ground, “I pray that you may finally rest in peace. Your people are free now.”

  It wasn’t quite the truth, and she knew it. Her shoulders hung heavy with the truth. Not a single dark-skinned man, woman, or child had set foot on that piece of land since the runaways had been murdered all those years ago. She shut her eyes as the violence of that night echoed between the trees.

  “Are you familiar with the Fugitive Slave Act, ma’am?” the man asked one of the sisters. He didn’t wait for a response. Instead, he announced for all to hear, “The Fugitive Slave Act states here that we have the right to search these premises for runaway slaves. It also states that anyone harboring runaway slaves will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Now, we’ve heard some pretty disturbing things about you folks. Heard you have injuns and harlots livin’ here like they was proper folks. That true?”

  The sound of doors being kicked in and children and women screaming broke out through the trees. The sky lit up like the sun had risen. Ninny fell back on her rump and gaped as the roof of the school caught fire, the wood shingles burning like kindling. The gathering house was next. The heat of the climbing flames warmed her face from a hundred feet away. The crackle and roar nearly drowned out the screams and cries of the Believers out on the road. The sound of feet running through the dried leaves pounded past her fifty feet away, and young Ninny pressed herself to the ground, hoping her shape stayed lost in the shadows.

  With her ear to the grass, she could hear the voices hidden there in the root cellar. A baby crying, and beneath it, much softer and sweeter, a mother sang a frightened lullaby.

  “Be still,” she called into the ground. “They are coming!”

  Through the brush, she saw the silhouettes of three men with rifles against the hot glow of the burning buildings. They scanned the grounds, no doubt looking for the poor souls hidden beneath her. With a whispered prayer, Ninny pulled herself to her feet and darted into the tree line.

  The men with the rifles heard the squalls of the baby from beneath the ground.

  Elder Samuel and the other Believers backed away in horror as the slave hunters began digging through the loose dirt. In short order, they uncovered the hatch door. Shotguns trained on the entrance to the root cellar, and the leader of the raiders threw it open, ready for hell to break loose.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the slave hunter muttered, recoiling from some gruesome scene splayed out below. Ninny lifted her head in horror as she realized that the baby had stopped crying.

  “Jesus,” one of them whispered.

  “You all owe me twelve hundred dollars. Got that?” the leader barked at Elder Samuel. “That’s what they’s worth! Twelve hundred.”

  Samuel fell to his knees, head hung low. “If money is all you wanted, we could have settled this quite easily. This blood is on your hands now. You will be the one to answer for it when His judgment comes.”

  “His judgment, huh? Well, I don’t go in for your religion, old man. I’ve got my own church, and I’m sitting just fine with God.” As if to prove it, the man stomped down into the cellar. “You think God really cares about these ones down here? Cuttin’ and stabbin’ themselves like this?”

  A muffled scream burst out of the ground. A large dark-skinned man in Shaker clothes took off running up and out of the hole before the others could react. A knife was in his hand, and blood darkened his shirt. His feet pounded the earth, making six long strides toward the trees before the first bullet hit his back. It took three more slugs to bring him down.

  He hit the ground at the edge of the tree stand to the sound of men shouting and the lone high-pitched scream of a girl hiding in the underbrush. The man died staring into her blue, blue eyes, her pale face half-hidden by a tree. As the killers came running, she crumpled to the ground ten feet from his fallen body.

  They didn’t see her lying there in the undergrowth.

  “Darn it, Jeb! Why couldn’t you just shoot ’im in the leg?” one of the men called out after inspecting the kill. He kicked the side of the dead man as though he were a horse. “We can’t do nothin’ with him now. Dammit!”

  Ninny lay there petrified, staring into the dead man’s face until the Elders came to drag him to his unmarked grave. His black eyes stared into hers, the eyes of God gazing right into her soul. Why? they asked.

  They hadn’t buried the four victims of the raid that night in the North Union graveyard. Instead, all evidence of them in the Valley of God’s Pleasure had been buried along with their bodies in the bloodstained ground. We can no longer harbor fugitives of the law, Elder Samuel had decreed. The fires set against us are a warning, a warning we must heed.

  And now it was too late.

  Ninny gazed up at the fifteen windows of the house above her. A young woman’s ghostly face gaped back at her from a second floor room. Her features contorted in a mask of outrage at the strange old crone trespassing in her garden.

  It was no use to try and scuttle away. Ninny couldn’t move that fast, and besides, no policeman would arrest her. Not an old woman like her. Not for sitting on a bench. Ninny sighed and waited.

  Inside the house, a startled Georgina wished her husband were home from work. Walter would know what to do and say, but he wasn’t there. Making her way down the hall, she made a concerted effort not to bother Ella or the boy reading stories in his room. Walter Junior had been having such nightmares lately, waking up screaming two or three times a night. She paused at his door and listened to him sounding out the words in his storybook.

  “Good, shavo!” the housekeeper cooed when he’d finished. “You read me the story about the monkey now. That one makes old Ella laugh.”

  Georgina slipped past them and down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen and then out the back door. “Excuse me,” she said loudly, approaching the stranger on the bench. “This is my home. May I help you?”

  Ninny gazed up at the woman with tired eyes. “Forgive me, ma’am. I did not mean to disturb you.”

  Seeing clearly now the woman’s age, Georgina relaxed ever so slightly. “I am not disturbed, but you are on my property. Are you lost?” The younger woman looked toward the street, wondering how the old woman had wandered back there.

  “No. Not lost.
I know exactly where I am.” Ninny smiled, flashing three missing teeth. Her face was a map of everywhere she’d been: the scars from the war, the years of hard labor, the children she’d borne.

  Georgina studied its contours, growing more curious by the minute. “Do you live nearby?” She straightened herself, silently cataloging her neighbors and their relatives.

  “No. Not for a long, long time . . . but I went to grammar school right over there.”

  Georgina lifted her carefully plucked eyebrows and turned in surprise toward her neighbor’s house.

  “It was a long time ago.” Ninny nodded. “This all used to be farmland. I must say it is awful strange to see it now.”

  Figuring the math of the woman’s face, Georgina slowly nodded. “I imagine it is. You were one of them, then? The Shakers?” Another broken smile made the younger woman shift her gaze uncomfortably.

  “I suppose. But we never really called ourselves that. That was more what the outside world thought of us. You can’t really tell much of anything looking in from the outside though, can you?”

  The turn of phrase charmed Georgina into a rueful smile as she gazed up the back of her stately home. “I suppose not.”

  Ninny studied her then, with the younger woman’s focus shifted elsewhere. Thin. Too thin. Pale. Brittle. Far too brittle for her age. The young lady appeared haunted.

  The moment the thought crossed the old woman’s mind, Georgina flinched as though she’d heard something.

  “I think you ought to know something about this place,” Ninny whispered. She forced her creaking body up from the bench. “A long, long time ago, four people died right where we’re standing. They were murdered, you know.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Georgina stiffened and swung her attention back to the old woman in her garden.

  “They were buried right here.” The old woman tapped the ground beneath their feet with her cane. “Two men. A young woman. And . . .” The words a baby died in her throat, too cruel to say out loud.

  “What?” Georgina backed away from the invisible graves. Her mouth fell open. “I am sorry, but—I think you had better leave.”